A week ago, the Palestinian Resistance Movement Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad warned Israel that they plan to return to ‘martyrdom attacks’ inside Israel.
“The Brigades affirm that martyrdom operations within the occupied territories will return to the forefront as long as the massacres by the occupation, the displacement of civilians and the assassination policy continue,” a joint statement by Al-Qassam Brigades and Al-Quds Brigades said.
Palestinian groups have refrained from using martyrdom attacks, or suicide bombings, as it is often called by mainstream media, as a central piece of their ongoing resistance against Israel.
The warning followed an explosion that rocked Tel Aviv on the evening of Sunday.
Initially, Israeli media conveyed a degree of confusion regarding what had transpired in the Israeli capital, before an Israeli police commander announced that there was a 99 per cent chance that the operation was “an attempted terror attack”.
Later, Israel said that the attacker may have originated from the Nablus area of the southern West Bank.
The attack and the announcement of responsibility by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad the following day are significant and could become the beginning of a strategic shift by Palestinians in their ongoing war against the Israeli occupation.
But why would Palestinians return to such operations?
Since 7 October, the Israeli war on Gaza has expanded to reach other domains, thus complicating the mission of the Israeli army, which has been overstretched to fight on several fronts.
While the war in Gaza itself remains the main battlefield, other war fronts began escalating with time, mainly the border war between the Lebanese Resistance Movement, Hezbollah, and the Israeli occupation army.
To prevent the West Bank from turning into a major front for the resistance, the Israeli army began carrying out bloody, but focused, attacks on Palestinian resistance brigades, which operate mostly in the northern West Bank.
Geographically isolated and operating mostly in small groups, Palestinian fighters underwent a bloody, disproportionate war against the Israeli army.
The Israeli occupation army’s confidence was buoyed by the fact that security forces and intelligence belonging to the Palestinian Authority openly cooperated with the Israeli military in their attempt to crush the resistance.
The degree of cooperation reached its zenith on 26 July, when PA security forces besieged the 26-year-old leader of the Tulkarm Brigades, and other fighters, in the Thabet Thabet Hospital in Tulkarm.
If it were not for hundreds of ordinary Palestinians who rushed to the hospital to rescue their youth, the fighters would have been apprehended, if not even worse.
But Israel’s military campaign to crush the resistance in the West Bank was hardly a success. According to Al Jazeera, 100 Palestinian operations were carried out in the last month alone.
Meanwhile, the resistance in Gaza has proved its durability, moving from the stage of defense to that of counter-attacks on more than one occasion. The operation by Hamas’s Al-Qassam fighters targeting Israeli forces inside the fortified Netzarim area in central Gaza, on Sunday, was a case in point.
These developments have been taking place in the larger context of the widening confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel, with the former extending its pinpointed operations to reach Nahariya, among other areas, in northern Israel.
Despite all the setbacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has managed to reverse his dwindling numbers among potential voters. According to a poll conducted by the Israeli newspaper Maariv on 9 August, the Likud Party, led by Netanyahu, would be the largest party in the Knesset if elections were held today. This is the first time such results have been seen since 7 October.
A combination of factors led to the resurgence of Netanyahu in opinion polls.
First, the Israeli leader’s main rival, Benny Gantz has failed to galvanize on the anti-Netanyahu and anti-government popular sentiments starting on 7 October.
Second, Netanyahu’s ability to guarantee US support for his aggressive regional policies helped reassure the Israeli public.
Third, the direct involvement of the US-British and other western navies in confronting Yemen’s Ansarallah – Houthis – in the Red Sea has partly downgraded the geopolitical threat of the Yemeni solidarity with the Palestinians.
Fourth, the daring assassination of top Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on 31 July, and the assassination of leading Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr the day before, allowed Netanyahu to sell the idea, however temporary, that Israel has regained its so-called ‘deterrence’.
And, finally, despite the interception of occasional missiles beyond the Gaza Envelope or Israel’s northmost regions, Israeli society in the central areas of the country has learned to adapt to the new reality of the war.
While the Israeli army is losing an unprecedented number of soldiers and equipment on multiple fronts, not all Israelis are experiencing that loss in their everyday lives.
The opposite is true for Palestinians and Lebanese.
For the former, the genocide in Gaza has turned into a daily reality, and the Israeli occupation forces’ war on the West Bank has proved to be the most violent since the Second Intifada or Uprising of 2002.
Meanwhile, in Lebanon, Israel continues to target civilian areas as a matter of course, thus constantly challenging the rules of engagement that have governed the relationship between the Israeli army and the Lebanese resistance for years.
The new status quo may have assured Netanyahu that he might be able to carry on with his war in Gaza, reject any reasonable ceasefire proposal and maintain low-intensity warfare with Lebanon.
Netanyahu would also like to see the US-British war on Yemen escalate into an all-out war against Iran.
The Palestinian warning of their intention to return to striking deep inside Israel is meant to disturb Netanyahu’s calculations.
By denying Israelis any sense of security in major cities inside Israel, the Israeli public could, once more, turn against Netanyahu for failing to deliver on any of his lofty promises.
It remains unclear whether last Sunday’s truck bombing was the exception or the start of a new norm. Either way, Netanyahu and his security apparatus must be aware of how such a move could prove equally costly to all of Israel’s losing wars, on all fronts.
-Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is ‘These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC).
